Communities open hearts to hurt vets

Special Report

Paralyzed from the waist down, Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson Jr. couldn’t reach the front door of his parents’ house in Dale City, Va., when he returned from Iraq in May.

Inside, he couldn’t get into his bedroom or the bathroom because his wheelchair couldn’t fit through the doors. He couldn’t take a shower because his wheelchair was too big for the stall.

“We never really sat and thought about it,” said Sgt. Simpson, 28, who was injured in a roadside bombing outside of Tikrit in April. “Then when I got here, I thought, ‘How am I going to get into the house, and how am I going to get through these doors?’ ”

His concerns — and prayers — were answered by a group of local residents and businesses who made his parents’ home and yard wheelchair-accessible. Local builders will begin construction on a new house for Sgt. Simpson, his wife and four young sons.

Sgt. Simpson’s story is just one example of the ways that a network of local residents, business owners, churches and charitable groups have been opening their hearts, homes and wallets to help rehabilitate members of the armed services who are recovering from injuries in the war against global terrorism.

As of Nov. 6, 318 troops from Virginia, Maryland and the District have been wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some residents are donating food and toiletries to group homes like the Fisher House in Northwest, where disabled troops and their families stay for free as they undergo treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Others help out like the owners of Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steakhouse at the Capital Hilton in Northwest, which serves free steak dinners on Friday nights to patients at Walter Reed.

Army Sgt. Rufus Brumfield, 26, of McComb, Miss. said the dinners are a bright spot in his weeks of physical-therapy treatments for a neck injury that he suffered during a riot drill in Germany.

“They make you feel that all the sweat, the hard work and the pain, that people recognize that,” he said.

The community’s generosity has been a great support system for the wounded troops.

“The way I see it the community is giving back to the soldiers,” said Army Spc. Moises Bonilla, who suffered an eye injury in Iraq. “It’s also like a relief medicine.”

Several days after giving an interview to a reporter for The Washington Times, Spc. Bonilla, 26, a native of Connecticut, was expected to return to his duties in Iraq.

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